Residents mixed on proposed smoking ban in public housing

NEW YORK (AP) — The federal government's proposal today to ban smoking inside and out of public housing nationwide got a decidedly mixed reaction from the people most affected.

Some who suffer from second-hand smoke were thrilled, but others, including some nonsmokers, worried that it gives the government yet another reason to harass or even evict poor people for doing what would otherwise be a legal activity in the privacy of their own homes.

"I think it is completely bogus," said Devante Barrett, a 24-year-old nonsmoker who lives in the Elliot-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan's gritty Chelsea neighborhood. "You might as well have us all chained up in bondage now."

Smoking is already banned in about 20 percent of the nation's federally subsidized housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to extend that to the other 940,000 units around the country, in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami.

"I would not like that. And other residents wouldn't like that either. But I would have to comply with it," said chain-smoker Dana Jones, shaking her head as she escorted her 11-year-old son past a clutch of smokers outside Bethel Towers, an apartment complex next to a church in downtown Atlanta.

But her son said he tells her every day that she needs to stop, and Jones acknowledged that a federal ban would probably force her to finally abandon the habit.

HUD Secretary Julian Castro said a nationwide ban would protect more than 760,000 children and save about $153 million a year in health care costs, repairs and preventable fires.